From Mourning to Environmentalism: a Sicilian Controversy About Children's Deaths, Political Apathy and Leukemia
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From mourning to environmentalism: a Sicilian controversy about children's deaths, political apathy and leukemia Gaetano Mangiameli1 University of Bologna, Italy 1. Introduction Political apathy is harmful to health. This sentence summarizes the voices of activists concerned about a leukemia cluster and deaths from the disease in Lentini, Sicily, who have been calling for explanations for more than two decades. Their campaign calls into question a division between 'natural' and 'social' explanations for disease. The case is an example of the contrast between common sense, folk wisdom, and public opinion on the one hand, and bureaucracy and the state on the other. Since the late 1980s, the town of Lentini has experienced growing concern about the incidence of leukemia among children. In order to shed light on this phenomenon, a campaign was launched by a civic association that unified people whose children had died of leukemia. As a reaction to an embarrassed silence by government institutions about a possible leukemia cluster, campaigners kept on demanding official explanations. This article describes the construction of the aetiology of leukemia and its cultural aspects, and underlines how asymmetries of power structure the cultural frames of interpretation of the disease. I ask, how was leukemia constructed as a social object in this case? What kind of social capital and what kind of cultural capital were used in order to frame the disease? The bottom-up discourse of campaigners framed leukemia as an environmental disease connected to wider socio-political phenomena affecting Sicily and Italy. They adopted a cultural filter that selected extraordinary, outrageous, and sensationalist circumstances as acceptable explanations, insofar as children's deaths were also considered extraordinary. The most frequently mentioned factor underlying the incidence of the disease was the management of radioactive waste, which is allegedly related to the US Naval Air Station located nearby at Sigonella and/or to the dumping of radioactive waste in the countryside by the Mafia. 2. Methodology and 'facts' Questions about the social production of toxic uncertainty are often related to a 'solid ground' which is taken as a matter of fact and upon which different opinions emerge. For an example, the sociologists Auyero and Swinston (2008) start from the following questions: "How do people perceive an environmentally risky situation? When do they fail to understand what is objectively a clear and present danger?" (Auyero and Swinston 2008: 357). The underlying assumption is that there is a common ground of reality upon which different actors construct different meanings, namely their opinions. This very assumption cannot be taken for granted in the case presented in this article. At the present moment a comprehensive and shared account of the facts claimed by anti-leukemia activists is not available. On the one hand, local citizens, either in public or in private, show a high degree of awareness about the factors underlying leukemia, or – to be more explicit - a deep confidence in the worst case scenario (namely the involvement of an American air base in Sicily called Sigonella, or the Mafia); on the other hand, their suspicions have not yet been legitimated by public authorities. While popular rumours and journalistic inquiries have been feeding a bottom-up narrative which connects several presumed facts in a web of suspicions, there is no top-down counter-narrative coming from the State. Furthermore, the bottom-up narrative and the top-down silence are related, since the attitude of formal institutions has stimulated the worst suspicions. In this case, the factual ground is somewhat slippery. In such context, as an anthropologist, I do not aim at providing a full account of factual reality, through a journalistic account or a data-based historical reconstruction. My purpose, here, is the elicitation of the cultural instruments that have been used to attribute meaning to children's death. The article is based on my prolonged experience on the field as an ethnographer who is also a native citizen of Lentini (Figure 1). In other words, I have constructed an intimate knowledge of the context over a long period of time, as I was growing up in the town. As a consequence, my research belongs to the category of endogenous ethnography or endo-ethnography (Van Ginkel 1998). Over (at least) fifteen years I have witnessed numerous conversations about leukemia in Lentini. Furthermore, I have read a number of brief and _________________________________________________________________________ 1 Dr. Gaetano Mangiameli, Postdoctoral Fellow and Temporary Lecturer, DiDiSAG - Dipartimento di Storia Culture Civiltà, University of Bologna, Italy. Email: gaetano.mangiameli "at" unibo.it. Thank you to two anonymous reviewers and the editors. This paper is in Koensler A. and C. Papa (eds.) "After anthropocentrism? Environmental conflicts, social movements and power," special section of the Journal of Political Ecology 20: 255-341. Mangiameli From mourning to environmentalism in Sicily frustrating references to the relation between environmental pollution and childrens' deaths in local newspapers, websites and social media. All these sources point to the same catalogue of facts. Insofar as the Mafia is allegedly involved in this affair, and some issues currently covered by State secrecy, the matter needs to be handled with care. In order to respect ethical and methodological principles, then, I will provide a summary of the main aspects of the story without attributing the account to any specific supporter of the campaign who discussed the issue in public or private. Furthermore, since from a legal point of view the Italian Republic has never acknowledged - or replied to - any of the attempts to clarify this matter, I rely on the contents of a Parliamentary question that three Senators addressed to three Ministers of the Italian Government in 2007. This information has also come up in everyday conversations, and in a case presented in 2006 by Manuela & Michele – Associazione per bambini leucemici ('Association for leukemic children', hereafter referred to as MM) at the Procura della Repubblica of Siracusa (the Siracusa District Court). Figure 1: Lentini, Sicily. The Lago di Lentini is 3km north-west, and the Sigonella U.S. Naval Air Station is 17 km north of the town. In this document, the Associazione MM presented evidence that radioactive waste from public hospitals in Northeastern Italy might have been illegally transported and discharged around Lentini and that a further significant amount of radioactive material might have been locally released due to a US military plane crash, described below. The 2006 court case has yet to reach a resolution. Indeed, the fact that the case is still ongoing – officially, at least - is considered in positive terms by the activists, as they fear the inquiry itself could have simply disappeared without trace. The 2007 parliamentary question was proposed by three Senators. Liotta, Russo Spena and Martone from the PRC (Partito della Rifondazione Comunista) were elected to the Italian Senate in 2006. They asked the Minister of Environment, the Minister of Health and the Minister of Defense for a detailed scientific inquiry about leukemia in Lentini, Carlentini and Francofonte, given local concerns and mortality in these places. The three senators cited reportage in the media, and a report on cancer published by the local Health Authority (ASL 8 – Siracusa) as their sources, in order to bring the case to the Government's attention. They raised four points; • First, the leukemia mortality rate in the area is the "highest in Italy and it is still increasing", with special reference to children's death. • Secondly, the Health Authority report suggests the hypothesis that the leukemia cluster might be related to nuclear pollution. • Thirdly, the town of Lentini, whose territory hosts the NATO base of Sigonella dominated by US forces, is also very close to the area where two accidents currently covered by State Secrets occurred in 1984 and 1985, involving US Air Naval Force units. The 1984 accident is the most frequently mentioned in the social discourse on leukemia.2 When on 12 July 1984 a US military aircraft carrying depleted uranium as ballast crashed in the countryside close to _________________________________________________________________________ 2 See for example http://invisibil.blogspot.it/2007/09/leucemie-e-radiazioni-lentini.html Journal of Political Ecology Vol. 20, 2013 319 Mangiameli From mourning to environmentalism in Sicily Lentini,3 the area was secured by the Americans just 12 minutes after the accident and then was kept under their control for four months, during which time the Italian authorities were not allowed in. • Fourthly, the DIA (Direzione Investigativa Antimafia) has discovered that the Sigonella Base used to discharge its waste in illegal dumps managed by companies whose owners were actually proxies for the Santapaola-Ercolano Mafia family. The Senators asked whether the Minister of Health and the Minister of Environment were willing to launch an inquiry in order to clarify the relation between children's death and radioactive pollution, and, secondly, whether the Minister of Defense was willing to remove the State Secret classification currently covering any information related to the air crashes occurred close to Lentini. As it is possible to see on the website of the Italian Senate, the parliamentary